Greeting cards and photographs have given people the world over a visual memory of good times and pictures of their loved ones. Long after our closest relatives have departed this journey through life, photographs preserve the only images we have to remember them.
With all the advances in audio technology, from Edison's phonograph to the compact disc, sound recording has become common place; however, audio recordings of our friends and relatives are much rarer than photographs. The arrival of VCRs and home audio-visual cameras has changed this scarcity of audio remembrances of our relatives, but such equipment is costly and display of the audio-visual recording must be through a complex electronics system.
Heretofore, cassette recordings of one's voice or speech could be sent in the mail and played on a tape recorder; however, an investment in equipment is required on the part of the receiver of the tape in order to reproduce the sound and speech recorded message.
There is a need for an audio message system which provides reproduced sound that can be sent to a relative or friend in a medium which requires no special equipment on the part of the receiving party to hear a pre-recorded audio message.